Line Numbering possible?

[James Jesse]

Hello dear forum users,
I am a teacher and had the idea of printing some short stories (from the Projekt Gutenberg) for my students.

I have used this site to extract epubs quickly and imported those into my Calibre library.

Is there a way to add line numbering in Calibre itself?
I have tried to search the forum, but couldn't find a thread that had answers to my question.
The line numbers essential for the intended use in school.

I would deeply appreciate any advice on this subject.

[stumped]

much depends on how you define a " line". because different device settings will change how many words appear in a "line" on the screen.
if you need to preserve the word count per line from some original source, you'd arguably be better of with non re-flowable pdf, not epub
ssame issue will of course apply to " page"
both line and page make not a lot of sense on an e-reader where everything can be scaled up or down by each user

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by James Jesse

Hello dear forum users,
I am a teacher and had the idea of printing some short stories (from the Projekt Gutenberg) for my students.

I have used this site to extract epubs quickly and imported those into my Calibre library.

Is there a way to add line numbering in Calibre itself?
I have tried to search the forum, but couldn't find a thread that had answers to my question.
The line numbers essential for the intended use in school.

I would deeply appreciate any advice on this subject.

Originally Posted by stumped

much depends on how you define a " line". because different device settings will change how many words appear in a "line" on the screen.
if you need to preserve the word count per line from some original source, you'd arguably be better of with non re-flowable pdf, not epub
ssame issue will of course apply to " page"
both line and page make not a lot of sense on an e-reader where everything can be scaled up or down by each user

Paragraph numbers would be a more sensible option than line or page numbers.

The calibre viewer will display them if the Reference mode button is pressed, see attachment.

I am not aware of any way to get paragraph numbers injected into the epub itself, but that doesn't mean there isn't a way.

BR

[Brett Merkey]

"Line" does not seem to have a practical definition for an e-book except as a paragraph. If that is what you mean, then there are 2 fairly simple ways to produce a number before every paragraph which will also be visible printed:

1) Edit the Calibre regex-function "Auto-Number." I have tested this and it works fine and is best if you want the numbering to go from 1 to the very last paragraph.

2) The easiest is to use the auto-numbering capabilities of CSS. This will do the numbering by chapter, which is how it is usually done. The other advantage is that the number can be styled to stand out. Add to your stylesheet:

body {
  counter-reset: para; /* Set a counter named 'para' */
}

p::before {
  counter-increment: para;  /* Increment value by 1 */
  content: counter(para) " ";  /* Display value with space */
  font-weight: bold;
}

[James Jesse]

Originally Posted by Brett Merkey

2) The easiest is to use the auto-numbering capabilities of CSS. This will do the numbering by chapter, which is how it is usually done. The other advantage is that the number can be styled to stand out. Add to your stylesheet:

Thank you for your answer.
This solution has indeed added numbers to the paragraphs which seem to correspond to the lines.

Then I converted the epub to doc for printing and there are no numbers visible. Shouldn't there be some at this point?

[Brett Merkey]

Originally Posted by James Jesse

Then I converted the epub to doc for printing and there are no numbers visible. Shouldn't there be some at this point?

The code I posted is effective for the ePub format you mentioned as well as for AZW3, the other format that Calibre offers edit tools. By converting to a non-html format, you have essentially deleted that code.

If you have an ePub book that you judge to be ready for print, open the ePub in the Calibre viewer and select the "Print to PDF" tool. Then open the .pdf file created and print with whatever options your pdf viewer allows.

The line numbers will be in place, just as they were in the original ePub book.